Thursday, July 19, 2012

Equity, a DISD Problem?

Equal treatment and education for all students is an issue in every school and school district. It is an issue in DISD.

Dallas must decide how equal we want our educational opportunities to be in DISD. Finland decided decades ago for complete equality for all students. This difference is combined with teachers who come from the best performing 10% of students in Finland, and who then must all secure masters degrees before teaching with slightly higher salaries than U.S. teachers. Finland has now enjoyed producing the highest achieving 15 year olds in the world for the past decade, sharing top honors with one or two other nations for the highest average scores on earth in the PISA exams given in 65 nations. One fourth of the nations taking the PISA (Program for International Student Assessment) have students with better average scores than the United States.

Equal educational opportunity for all students is one of the central issues negatively affecting education in the U.S.. But, where is DISD? If equity among schools were a national priority then funding and public focus would be on all schools.

In the chart below are comparisons of the major high schools in DISD on various measurements. This list is in order with the high schools with the most teacher time allocated per student listed first. These are planned teacher allocations for the 2012/13 budget year. If you allocate teacher time with a 40 hour week you quickly find that the first schools listed are the schools with over half an hour per week per student more teacher time than the other schools down the list.

The percent of Anglo enrollment in each school is also given along with poverty levels and recent SAT/ACT achievement history. What questions does this data produce?﻿
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Teacher Allocation by High School for 2012-13 DISD budget with poverty levels and SAT/ACT scores given for recent years. (Right-click and hit "open link" to enlarge and/or print.)